To produce rigid packets of cigarettes, cardboard blanks must be fed to a pickup station of the packing machine so that each blank is withdrawn individually and folded about a group of cigarettes to form a packet of cigarettes.
The blanks are flat pieces of cardboard cut and notched beforehand to form fold lines, and are supplied in packages comprising a pallet on which the blanks are arranged for optimum transport and packing.
The blanks in each package are divided into side by side stacks to form layers, which in turn are stacked on the pallet and separated from one another by separators. The cigarette packing machine comprises a blank store for supplying the pickup station, where each blank is withdrawn individually by a gripping member and transferred to folding stations on the packing machine. In the store, the blanks are arranged in a seamless succession, and are packed and aligned with one another so as to be picked up by the gripping member in a given position and with a given orientation.
Given the increasingly fast output rate of automatic packing machines, all the blanks in the package must be transferred rapidly to the store to replace the empty pallet with a new package and, at the same time, arrange the blanks in the required orderly succession in the store.
Current transfer methods fail to provide for transferring and simultaneously arranging the blanks in the required orderly succession in the store, in such a manner as to meet the requirements of modern automatic packing machines.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,183,380 discloses a feeding apparatus for automatically transferring stacks of blanks from a pallet to a blank magazine of a high performance packaging machine. The feeding apparatus comprises an endless pocket conveyor between a feed station and the blank magazine; each pocket of the pocket conveyor receives a relevant blank stack in the feed station, transports the blank stack along a feeding path to the supply magazine, in which the stack is automatically pushed out of the conveyor pocket into the blank magazine. The feeding apparatus disclosed by U.S. Pat. No. 5,183,380 has a relatively high fast output rate; however, such feeding apparatus is cumbersome, complicated and expensive.